Saturday, January 26, 2008

Oh no, not again.

John C. Dvorak and the MacBook Air Jordan have appeared in the same post. You can guess what that means.

He's right, you know, on a few points. His spelling, grammar, and punctuation seem to be pretty good. He used what looks like a nice readable font. He's also correct that the MBAJ is not a powerhouse übercomputer. Aside from that, though, he's pretty much full of crap.

Let's liken an MBAJ to, say, an Audi TTS, and a MacBook Pro to a Ford F-150. A MacPro Dual-Quad 3 GHz, in this scenario is a Mack truck.

If you, on the airplane, need to do poster-sized Photoshop renderings, or pre-production work on a Pixar movie, or a last-minute score for a Scorsese film with FinalCut Pro, well, an MBAJ probably isn't the computer you'll want to carry. Likewise, if you need to haul a cubic yard of bark to your house, you probably won't use your Audi. If you need that sort of thing, get the pickup truck.

In fact, if you're going to do any real heavy-duty computing, you'll probably want to do most of it on that MacPro. The 'book will be mostly for peripheral details.

Now let's say you want to show off pictures of the new baby, listen to music, or watch a couple of movies on the plane. Rent the movies on iTunes, drop the movies, photos, and music library on the MBAJ, get on the plane at La Guardia and annoy the person next to you all the way to O'Hare. You could do that with a MacBook Pro, but it's heavier, bulkier, and not as cool.

In the same way, you could go clubbing in the F-150. If it's all you have, it will do. But if you're a style-conscious trendsetter, and you can afford something slick and sporty and attractive like a TTS, you'll take that instead.

And then, if you want to transport MBAJs to NYC Apple Stores, you'll need a lot of cargo capacity. Use the Mack.

In the way that political humorists and comedians love George Bush, I love John C. Dvorak.

Coffee time.